Where did the blog posts go?

You may be wondering just that – where did all of the blog posts go? Why did Cummings stop talking about writing, work, kids, and everything else?

Believe it or not, they are still being written. Sort of. On June 1, I cracked open a new Moleskine journal and began writing in it every day (or thereabouts). Every day, I start by transcribing a quote from a book of daily stoic thoughts I’ve been plodding through. I don’t always add commentary, but I find that the act helps get my mind into the right frame for journaling.

Then I write. Sometimes, it’s a paragraph. Other days, I’ll fill pages after pages. A lot has been going on, very little something I want to air to the public, but all of it needing the act of writing to work through. It used to be, I’d write a blog post to focus some of that. Now, I journal, where I can be a little more candid and a lot more honest. There are no other readers besides myself, and some future historian looking for a snapshot of this mundane life.

The side effect, though, is that I write less on the blog. It’s nothing personal, but I find I have less that I want to share these days. Am I still writing? Not as much as I’d like to be, but as much as I can. I have a few short stories I’m cleaning up, and I can feel the tendrils of a novel trying to worm their way into my brain, though I’d like to see if I can’t actually outline something for a change.

I wish I could offer something more, some promise of more blogging. I know that in general, blogging has died as an “art” form. I think the first of the death knells was when Google Reader was murdered in it’s sleep, and ever since then the art of the blog has dwindled and faded. A few blogs I follow are posting sporadically. One or two blogs that had started to die are coming back, and that’s nice to see too. As for me? I’ll always post things on here, sometimes frequently, other times with huge gaps. If you’re what might be called a regular reader – thank you. Writing anything, even a blog post, let alone a short story or novel, is an extremely lonely and insular activity. You write words with no audience, knowing that the time capsule of your thoughts will be opened and interpreted by someone else outside of your control. How they perceive and internalize your writing can be nerve wracking.

By the way, I completely filled that journal I started on the first of June and am well into another volume already. I don’t journal absolutely every day – I’ve missed two days so far in the last six months, both because of extended traveling. But I get pretty close to writing at least something every day. Analog blogging has its benefits, too.